The Boundaries of Natural Science

Boundaries of Natural Science: Lecture V

Schmidt Number: S-4233

On-line since: 31st July, 2007

V

Today it will be necessary
to come to terms with a number of things that actually can be understood
only if one is able to overcome certain prejudices that have long been
cultivated and zealously inculcated right up to the present day. Much
of what shall be said here today, and further substantiated tomorrow,
must be comprehended through raising oneself up to an inner viewing
[Anschauung] of the spirit. You must consider that when the
results of a scientific investigation of the spirit are met with a demand
for proof such as is recognized by contemporary science or jurisprudence,
or even contemporary social science — which is so useless in the
face of life itself — one does not get very far at all. For the
true spiritual scientist must already bear this method of demonstration
within himself. He must have schooled himself in the rigorous methods
of contemporary science, even of the mathematical sciences. He must
know what mode of demonstration is demanded in these circles, and he
must suffuse the processes of his whole inner life with this method:
therein he builds the foundation for a higher mode of cognition. For this
reason it is usually the case that when the demands of normal consciousness
are placed before the spiritual scientist, he is thoroughly at home
in the field from which the question stems. He has long since anticipated
the objections that can be raised. One could even go so far as to say
that he is only a spiritual scientist in the true sense of the word
— in the sense in which we characterized spiritual science yesterday
— to the extent that he has subjected himself to the rigorous
discipline of the modern scientific method and knows at least the tenor
of modern scientific thought quite well. I must make this one preliminary
remark and add one other. If one cannot transcend the manner of
demonstration that experimentation has made scientific habit, one shall
never attain knowledge that can benefit society. For in a scientific
experiment one proceeds — even if one cherishes the illusion that
it is otherwise — in such a way that one moves in a certain
direction and allows phenomena to confirm what lives within the ideas
one has formulated as a natural law, or perhaps mathematically.

Now, when one is required
to translate one's knowledge into social judgments, in other words, if
the ideas that one has formulated as the natural laws of contemporary
anthropology or biology or Darwinism — no matter how
“progressive”
this Darwinism might be — are to have validity; if one wants to
translate them into a social science that can become truly practical,
this knowledge obtained through experimentation is totally inadequate.
lt is totally inadequate because one cannot simply sit in a laboratory
and wait to see what one's ideas call forth when they are applied to
society. Thereby thousands upon thousands of people could easily die
or starve or be made to suffer in some other way. A great part of the
misery in our society has been called forth in just this way. Because
they have originated in pure experimentation, our ideas have gradually
become too narrow and impoverished to subsist in reality, which they
must be able to do if thought is ever to enrich the sphere of practical
life. I have already indicated the stance the spiritual scientist must
take regarding the two boundaries that arise within cognition —
the boundaries at the poles of matter and consciousness — if he
is to attain knowledge that can reflect light back into nature and at
the same time forward into the social future. I have shown that at the
boundary of the material world one must not allow one's thinking to
roll on with its own inertia in order to construct mechanistic, atomistic,
or molecular world conceptions tending toward the metaphysical but call
a halt at the boundary and develop instead something that normally is
not yet present as a faculty of cognition. One must develop Inspiration.
On the other hand, I have shown you that if one wishes to come to an
understanding of consciousness, one must not attempt, as Anglo-American
associative psychology does, to penetrate into consciousness with ideas
and concepts called forth by the natural world. It must be entirely
clear in one's mind that consciousness is constituted such that these
ideas culled from the external world can gain no access. We must abandon
such ideas and seek rather to enter the realm of Imaginative cognition.
In order to achieve self-knowledge we must permeate the concepts and
ideas with content, so that they become images. Until the view of man
which was born in the West and now has all of civilization in its grasp
is transformed into Imaginative cognition, we shall never progress in
coming to terms with this second boundary presenting itself to normal
human cognition.

At the same time, however,
one can say that humanity has evolved from certain stages, now become
historical, to the point that requires that it progress to Inspiration
on the one hand and Imagination on the other. Whoever is able to perceive
what humanity is undergoing at the present, what is just beginning to
reveal its first symptoms, knows that forces are rising out of the depths
of human evolution that tend toward the proper introduction of Imagination
and Inspiration into human evolution.

Inspiration cannot be
attained except by exercising a certain faculty of mental representation
in the way that I described in my book,
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment,
and shall describe at least in outline
in the coming lectures. When one has progressed far enough in a kind
of inner self-cultivation, a schooling of the self in a certain form
of mental representation [Vorstellen]; when one schools oneself
to live within the realm of representations, ideals, and concepts that
live within the mind — then one learns what it means to live in
Inspiration. For when one exercises consciously the faculty that otherwise
“mathematicizes” within us during the first seven years up
to the change of teeth (in normal life and in conventional science this
occurs unconsciously), when one enters into this “living mathematics,”
into this “living mechanics,” it is as though one were to
fall asleep, entering not into unconsciousness or nebulous dreams but
into a new form of consciousness that I shall begin to describe to you
today. One takes up into full consciousness what otherwise works within
as the sense of balance, the sense of movement, and the sense of life.
It is as though one were to wrest from oneself what otherwise lives
within as sensations of balance, movement, and life so that one lives
within them with the extended mathematical representations. Tomorrow
I shall speak about this at greater length. One passes over into another
consciousness, within which one experiences something like a toneless
weaving in a cosmic music. I cannot describe it otherwise. One unites
with this weaving in a toneless music in a way similar to that by which
one makes the physical body one's own through the activity of the ego
in childhood. This weaving in a toneless music provides the other, rigorously
demonstrable awareness that one is now outside the body with one's soul-spirit.
One begins to comprehend that even in normal sleep one's soul-spirit
is outside the body. Yet the experience of sleep is not permeated with
that which vibrates when leaving the body consciously through one's
own initiative, and one experiences initially something like an inner
unrest, an inner unrest that exhibits a musical quality when one enters
into it with full consciousness. This unrest is gradually elucidated
when the musical element one experiences there becomes a kind of wordless
revelation of speech from the spiritual cosmos. These matters naturally
appear grotesque and paradoxical to these who hear them for the first
time. Yet much has arisen in the course of cosmic evolution that first
appeared paradoxical and grotesque, and human evolution will not advance
if one wishes to pass over these phenomena only half-consciously or
unconsciously. Initially one has only a certain experience, an experience
of a kind of toneless music. Then out of this experience of toneless
music there arises something which, when experienced, enables us to
comprehend inwardly a content as meaningful as that which is conveyed
to us when we listen outwardly to a man who speaks to us via sensible
words. The spiritual world simply begins to speak, and one has only
to begin to acquire an experience of this.

Then one comes to experience
something at a higher level. One no longer only weaves and lives in a
toneless music and no longer merely perceives the speech of the
super-sensible spiritual world: one begins to recognize the contours of
something that reveals itself within this super-sensible world, the
contours of beings. Within this universal spiritual speech that one
initially encounters there emerge individual spiritual beings, in the
same way that we, listening at a lower level to the speech of another
man, crystallize or organize — if
I may use such trivial expressions — what reveals itself as his
soul and spirit into something substantial. We begin to live within
the contemplation and knowledge of a spiritual reality. This realm of
the spirit replaces the vacuous, insubstantial, metaphysical world of
atoms and molecules: it confronts us as the reality that lies behind
the phenomena of the sense world. We no longer stand in the same relation
to the boundary of the material world as when we allow conceptualizing to
roll on with its own inertia, attempting to carry the kind of thinking
developed through interaction with the sense world beyond the boundary.
Now we stand in a relationship to this boundary of sense such that the
spiritual content of the world suddenly stands revealed there. This is
one boundary to cognition.

Ladies and gentlemen,
humanity at this point in its evolution is yearning to step out of itself,
to step out of the body in this way, and one can see this tendency
exemplified quite clearly in certain individuals. Human beings seek to
withdraw from their bodies that which the spiritual scientist withdraws
with full consciousness. The spiritual scientist withdraws this in a way
analogous to the way in which he applies inwardly obtained concepts
in a systematic, organized fashion to the natural world. As some of
you will know, for some time now a great deal of attention has been
paid to a remarkable illness. Psychologists and psychiatrists term this
“pathological questioning or doubt”
[Grübelsucht; Zweifelsucht];
it would perhaps better be termed “pathological skepticism.”
One now encounters innumerable instances of this illness in the most
remarkable forms, and it is already necessary that the study of this
disease in particular be promoted within the cultural context of our
time. This illness manifests itself — you can learn a great deal
about it from the psychiatric literature — in these people, from
a certain age onward, usually from puberty or the period immediately
preceding puberty, no longer being able to relate properly to the
external world. When confronted with their experiences in the external
world, these people are overcome by an infinite number of questions.
There are certain individuals who, though they remain otherwise fully
rational, can pursue their duties to a great extent and are fully cognizant
of their condition, must begin to pose the most extraordinary questions
if they are but slightly withdrawn from what normally binds them to
the external world. These questions simply intrude into their life and
cannot be brushed aside. They intrude themselves especially strongly
in individuals with healthy, or even conspicuously healthy, organizations
— in individuals who have an open mind and a certain understanding
for the manner in which modern scientific thinking proceeds. They experience
modern science in this way, so that they cannot understand at all how
such questions arise unconsciously thereby. Such phenomena are evident
especially in women, who have less robust natures than men and who also
tend to acquire their knowledge of natural science, if they undertake
to do so, not so much through the highly disciplined scientific literature
but rather through works intended for laymen and dilettanti. For if at
this time immediately before puberty, or just when puberty is on the wane,
there should occur an intense preoccupation with modern scientific thought
in the way I have just described, among such people a high incidence
of this disease can be observed. It manifests itself in these people
having then to ask: where ever does the sun come from? And no matter
how clever the answers one gives them, one question always calls forth
another. Where does the human heart come from? Why does it beat? Did
I not forget two or three sins at confession? What happened when I took
Communion? Did a few crumbs of the Host perhaps fall to the ground?
Did I not try to mail a letter somewhere and miss the slot? I could
produce a whole litany of such examples for you, and you would see that
all this is eminently suited to keeping one uneasy.

Now, when the spiritual
scientist comes to consider this matter he feels himself right at home. It
is simply a manifestation of the element in which the spiritual scientist
resides consciously when he achieves an experience of the toneless musical
speech of spiritual beings through Inspiration.
Those afflicted with pathological skepticism enter this
region unconsciously. They have cultivated nothing that would enable them
to comprehend the state into which they enter. The spiritual scientist
knows that throughout the entire night, from falling asleep until waking,
one lives in an element consisting entirely of such questions,
that out of the sleeping state countless questions arise within one.
The spiritual scientist knows this condition, because he can experience
it consciously. Whoever approaches these matters from the standpoint
of normal consciousness and seeks thus to comprehend them will perhaps
make attempts at all kinds of rationalistic explanations, but he will
not arrive at the truth, because he is unable to comprehend the matter
through Inspirative cognition. Such a one sees that there are, for example,
people who go to the theater in the evening and on leaving the theater
are helpless to resist the countless questions that overcome them: what
is this actress's relationship to the outer world? What was that actor
doing some previous year? What are the relationships between the individual
actors and actresses? How was this or that flat constructed? Which painter
is responsible for each? and so on, and so on. For days on end such
people are subject to the influence of this pesky questioner within. This
is a pathological condition that one begins to understand only by realizing
that these people enter a region the spiritual scientist experiences in
Inspiration by approaching this realm differently from these afflicted
with this pathological condition. Persons in this pathological
state enter the same region as the spiritual scientist, but they do
not take their egos with them; in a certain sense they lose their egos
upon entering this realm. And it is just this ego that is the ordering
faculty. It is the ego that is capable of bringing the same kind of
order into this world as we are able to bring to our physical environment.
The spiritual scientist knows that one lives in this same region between
falling asleep and waking. Everyone who returns from the theater actually
is deluged by all these questions in the night while he sleeps, but
due to the operation of certain laws sleep normally spreads itself out
over this interlocutor, so that one has finished with him by the time
one awakes again.

In order to perform valid
spiritual research, one must bear into this region unimpaired judgment,
complete discretion, and the full force of the human ego. Then we do
not live in this region in a kind of super-skepticism but rather with
just as much self-possession and confidence as in the physical world.
And actually all the meditative exercises that I have given in my book,
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment,
are intended in large part to result in a greater ability
to enter this region preserving
one's ego in full consciousness and in strict inner discipline. The
purpose of a large part of the spiritual scientist's initial schooling
is to keep him from losing the inner support and discipline of the ego
while traversing this path.

The finest example in
recent times of a man who entered this region without full preparation
is someone whom Dr. Husemann has characterized here in another context.
The finest example is Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche is, to be sure,
an extraordinary personality. In a certain sense he was not an intellectual
at all. He was not your conventional scholar. With the tremendous gifts
of genius, however, he grew out of puberty into scientific research;
with these tremendous gifts he was able to take in what the contemporary
sciences can offer. That, despite having acquired this knowledge, he
did not become a scholar of the conventional sort is shown quite simply
by the polemics of so exemplary a modern scholar as Wilamowitz, who
came out in opposition immediately after the appearance of the young
Nietzsche's first publication. Nietzsche had just published his treatise,
The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music,
in which there
resounds a readiness to undergo initiation, to enter the musical, the
Inspirative — even the title reveals his yearning for the realm
that I have characterized — but he could not. The possibility
did not exist. In Nietzsche's time a conscious spiritual science did
not exist, but in giving his work the title,
The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music,
he indicated that he wished to come
to terms with a phenomenon such as Wagnerian tragedy out of this spirit
of music. And he entered further and further into this realm. As I said,
Wilamowitz immediately came out in Opposition and wrote his polemics
against
The Birth of Tragedy,
in which he completely rejected
from his academic point of view what Nietzsche, unschooled but yearning
for knowledge, had written. From the point of view of modern science
he was of course completely justified. And actually it is hard to understand
how so excellent a thinker as Erwin Rohde could have believed a compromise
was possible between this modern philology that Wilamowitz represented
and what lived within Nietzsche as a dark striving, as a yearning for
initiation, for Inspiration. What Nietzsche had acquired in this manner,
had inwardly appropriated, grew out into the other fields of contemporary
sciences. It grew into positivism, namely that of the Frenchman, Comte,
and the German, Dühring. While cataloguing Nietzsche's library in the
1890s I saw with my own eyes all the marks Nietzsche had so conscientiously
made in the margins of Dühring's works, from which he acquired
his knowledge of positivism; I held all these books in my own hand.
I could enter sympathetically right into the manner in which Nietzsche
took positivism up into himself. I could well imagine how he then reverted
to an extra-corporeal existence, where he experienced this positivism
again without having penetrated into this region sufficiently with his
ego. As a result, he produced works such as
Human, All Too Human,
exhibiting a constant oscillation between an inability to move within
the world of Inspiration and a desire to remain there nonetheless. One
notices this in the aphoristic progression of Nietzsche's style in these
works. Nietzsche strives to bring his ego into this realm, but it tears
itself away again and again: thus he produces not a systematic, artistic
presentation but only aphorisms. It is just this constant self-interruption
in aphorism that reveals the inward soul of this remarkable spirit.
And then he rises to encounter that which has provided modern science,
the contemporary physical sciences, with their greatest riddles. He
rises up to encounter what lives in Darwinism, what lives in the theory of
evolution, and attempts to demonstrate how the most complicated organisms
have gradually arisen out of the most primitive. He penetrates into
this realm, a realm into which I have sought in a modest way to bring
inner structure and an inward mobility — you can follow this in
the discussion of Haeckel in my book,
The Riddles of Philosophy.
Nietzsche enters this realm, and there emerges from his soul the notion
of a kind of super-evolution [Überevolutionsgedanke]. He
follows the course of evolution up to man, where this notion of evolution
explodes to create his “super-man.” In following this
self-progression of evolving beings he loses the content, because he
is unable to obtain the true content through Inspiration: he is confined
to the empty idea of “eternal recurrence.”

Only by virtue of the
inner integrity of his personality was Nietzsche able to avoid what
the pathologist calls “pathological skepticism.” It was
something within Nietzsche, a prodigious health that Nietzsche himself
sensed underlying his debility, that asserted itself and kept him from
falling prey to complete skepticism, leading him rather to contrive
what later became the content of his most inspiring words. No wonder,
then, that this excursion into the spiritual world, this striving to
proceed from music to the inner word, to inner being, culminated in
the most unmusical of ideas — that of “the eternal recurrence
of the same”— and the empty, merely lyrical “superman.”
No wonder that it had to end in the condition that his physician, for
example, diagnosed as an “atypical case of paralysis.”

Yes, this man who did
not know Nietzsche's inner life, who was incapable of judging it from
the standpoint of spiritual science and confronted the images and ideas
of Nietzsche's inner life as a mere psychiatrist, without sympathetic
understanding — this man found only an abstraction to answer the
question posed by the concrete case before him. With regard to all nature
du Bois-Reymond had said in 1872: ignorabimus. Confronted with
exceptional cases, the psychiatrist says: paralysis, atypical paralysis.
Confronted with concrete cases that reveal the essence of present human
evolution, the psychiatrist can say only ignorabimus, or
ignoramus. This is but a translation of what is clothed in the
words “atypical case of paralysis.”

This eventually destroyed
Nietzsche's body. It produced the condition that makes Nietzsche such a
revealing phenomenon within our contemporary cultural life. This is the
other form of the debility appearing in certain highly cultivated
individuals, which psychiatrists term pathological doubt or
hyper-skepticism.
And the phenomenon of Nietzsche — here I must be allowed a personal
remark — stood before my eyes the moment that, trembling, I entered
his room in Naumburg a few years after his illness. He lay upon the
sofa after dinner, staring into space. He recognized nobody around him
and stared at one like a complete idiot, but the light of his former
genius still gleamed within his eyes.

If one looked at Nietzsche
knowing all one could about his world view, about the ideas and images
that lived within his soul; if, unlike the mere psychiatrist, one stood
before Nietzsche, this ruin of a man, this physical wreck, with this
image in one's soul, then one knew: this man strove to view the world
revealed by Inspiration. Nothing of this world came forth to him. And
the part of him that desired to achieve Inspiration finally extinguished
itself: for years the physical organism was filled by a soul-spirit
devoid of content.

From such a sight one
can learn the whole tragedy of our modern culture, its striving for
the spiritual world, its inclination toward that which can proceed from
Inspiration. For me — and I do not hesitate in the slightest to
introduce a personal remark here — this was one of those moments
that can be interpreted in a Goethean manner. Goethe says that nature
conceals no secret that she is not willing to reveal in one place or
another. No, the entire world contains not a single secret that is not
revealed in one place or another. The present stage of human evolution
conceals the secret that humanity is giving birth to a striving, an
inclination, an impulse that rumbles within the social upheavals our
civilization is undergoing — an impulse that seeks to view the
spiritual world of Inspiration. And Nietzsche was the one point where
nature revealed its open secret, where the striving that exists within
humanity as a whole could reveal itself. We must seek this if all those
striving for education, seeking within modern science — and this
shall be the entire civilized world, for education must become universal
— if humanity as a whole is not to lose its ego and civilization
fall into barbarism.

That is one great cultural
anxiety, one great threat to civilization, which must be faced by anyone
who follows the contemporary progress of human evolution and seeks to
develop a thinking that can grasp the realities of social life. Similar
phenomena assert themselves on the other side as well, on the side of
consciousness. And we shall have to study these phenomena on the side
of consciousness at least in outline as well. We shall see how these
other phenomena arise out of the chaos of contemporary life, phenomena
that appear pathologically and have been described by Westphal, Falret,
and others. It is no accident that these have been described only just
in the most recent decades. On the other side, that of the boundary
of consciousness, we encounter the phenomena of claustrophobia,
astraphobia, and agoraphobia
[ 6 ],
just as we encounter pathological skepticism on the side of matter. And
in the same way (we shall discuss this further) in which pathological
skepticism must be cured culturally-historically through the cultivation
of Inspiration — one of the great talks of contemporary social
ethics — we are threatened with the emergence of the phenomena
that I shall describe tomorrow: claustrophobia, astraphobia, and
agoraphobia. These emerge pathologically and can be overcome through
Imagination, which, when civilization has acquired it, shall become
a social blessing for all humanity.